RECIPE DELIVERY! The new grocery shopping.

I needed dinner inspiration. At some point everyone needs it.

Of course there is online grocery delivery and Waitrose seems to have an endless selection of prepared meals, but frankly, I am bored of online grocery shopping and in-store shopping. Waitrose prepared meals have lost their appeal.

I want to cook and end up with meals that are an explosion of flavour and taste. 
I went in search of the new grocery shopping and 'Recipe Delivery' is where I have found my inspiration.

Recipe Delivery is a tasty business model. 
I have been exploring four UK based startups seeking to restore your domestic god and goddess status in the kitchen.

On my short list of services to try are HelloFresh, Gousto, Jessica'sRecipeBag and Dinnr.

All of the companies will deliver recipes with ingredients to your door for specific number of meals each week. The ingredients will be exact to eliminate wasted food and most of the meals take around 30 minutes to prepare.

The variation of each business model can be found in the details, both on their sites and digging beneath the surface.

I looked at aspects that are important to me, such as selecting recipes for my bag/box order, perusing ingredients, delivery days, mixing vegetarian with non, exotic ingredients and prices.

You may want to consider a few of these details before you select your Recipe Delivery service.

Delivery days :

Jessica'sRecipeBag delivers on Monday evenings

Dinnr delivers Monday through Saturday and has same day delivery

HelloFresh and Gousto deliver on Tuesdays

 

Prices of ingredients and delivery : 

Since I had a refrigerator full of vegetables and Gousto had a downloadable recipe list, I decide to start soft and both shop and cook the first week. I checked prices of a complete DIY meal in comparison with a delivered recipe meal to see if customers were getting charged for a premium food delivery service and if they were getting value for money on the groceries.  

The simple answer is you'll be getting charged the premium delivery service as expected and getting charged above retail prices on the food as well. All of these services are fledgling and they probably aren't yet getting access to wholesale prices on food. When they do, they most likely will keep the savings to aid growth and the customer won't see the deals get better.

If you only want 1 dinner this week, but 4 the next, then Dinnr is your service. It does appear to be slightly higher in price, but it is costly to deliver one dinner at a time.

Grab Bag or Recipe Bag Curation : If the recipe is important, then you should know that HelloFresh and Gousto let you see the recipes when you order your recipe bag/box for the week. 

Dinnr doesn't spell out their recipes or ingredients, but on their site you order each meal separately so it isn't an issue and pictures sell the dishes well. They also have starters and desserts, which the other services don't have.

Jessicasrecipebag just lets you order a bag of meals of their secret curation. There are lots of images on the site of the types of meals one can expect to receive, but it looks like 'comfort food' reigns here so I am not sure if this service is for me if I can't see what is going to be delivered to my door.  

Seeing the recipes on HelloFresh and Gousto have the added benefit of indicating the number of calories/fat/carbs/protein on each recipe.

Since this is a branding education-esque blog, I'll point out that Jessicasrecipebag acts more like a parent brand, where they give you what they think is best instead of the peer-to-peer model of letting you decide if you would like to order what is on offer by revealing the week's recipes. It is rare to go into a restaurant and let the chef make you whatever he feels like, unless you are paying for the privilege and even more rare for a grocery delivery service to pick all of your groceries for you. It simply doesn't happen often in food service, thus a brand needs to be aware that hiding their recipes may put some people off making that first order. Trust comes after the customer enjoys their first order.

Even seeing the recipes I managed to miss something important to me. In the 5 recipes I made from the downloadable Gousto recipes, 3 out of 5 had onions in the ingredients, of which I am not a huge fan. I didn't even realise it until the third recipe. 

Ingredients - everyday ordinary or are we seeking something more unique in a service :

Once I began thinking about the onions, I explored the ingredients and recipes of each brand further.

Each brand had recipes that I could order from a local takeaway. Maybe it is knowing how much salt is or isn't in the food because I have the pleasure of preparing it, that is at the heart of the Recipe Delivery business model. Or does it offer the opportunity to be more?

Now that I am engaged with the business model, I want more. I want to cook with flavour and lots of it. I want to try recipes of cuisines that I don't currently know how to cook and learn how, but I want them to taste better than my local takeaway. I want to be a burgeoning master chef in my own house!

Two of the recipes I tried from Gousto were slightly Eastern Asian in design and taste, but I was left a little disappointed that extent of exotic ingredients was a little fish sauce, rice noodles and bean sprouts.

There is real opportunity for one of these brands to breakaway from the pack and inspire the home cook with authentic meals that are flavorful works of art. Give us recipes with hard-to-find, expensive ingredients that expand our taste buds. Give us a reason to choose your brand over another by giving us ingredients we can't find ourselves at Sainsbury's. Build a little story of origin or discovery that we can share at the dinner table. Engage us, delight us and we'll be your biggest fans.  

HelloFresh is moving in this culinary direction. It has stories about cinnamon and chocolate and begins to make the ordinary, extraordinary with a slight twist of ingredients. Unfortunately I just missed two weeks of great recipes. This week they have comfort food and I see a few onions, so I'll try them out in the near future.

The recipe bags - a little customisation would increase conversion

One thing I have noticed about all 4 of the Recipe Delivery services is that there is no way to indicate that you don't eat pork, or that you are trying to omit meat for one meal a week and you'd like one meal to be vegetarian to expand your palette a bit more. I have an entire cookbook devoted to vegetarian meals, but still struggle to make a meal from it. I'd welcome a little help as long as I didn't have to endure 3 meals a week that are vegetarian. 

Some customer customisation would be a great feature to see in the future of these brands. A 'I'd like to try seafood once this week' bag or the 'no comfort food for me please' bag would make it more interesting.  Even a way to indicate upfront dislikes would help the brands to understand why a loyal customer takes a week off.

I plan to try each of the Recipe Delivery services in the coming weeks. I really enjoyed cooking the Gousto meals, learning how much lentils to serve for two people and knowing how many calories were in the meal I was serving. I am sure I will be delighted in ways I didn't imagine. 

Happy dinner exploration!